THE CR.ITICS / ø 1 4 , Ll) BOOKS MAN WITH A PAST Cavafy revisited. BY DAN CHIASSON S ometime before 1450 B.C. in the Egyptian city ofHeliopolis, the pha- raoh Thutmose III ordered a pair of obelisks. They were to be cut from red granite and erected at the Temple of the Rising Sun. Two hundred or so years later, Ramses II had them inscribed with boasts about his military triumphs. In 13 B.C., Augustus had the obelisks transported to Alexandria and installed at the Caesareum, Cleopatrà s tribute to her husband, Mark Antony. There they stood sentry for another two thousand years, as the Caesareum and every sub- sequent building on that site got pulver- ized. By the time Napoleon entered Al- exandria, in 1798, the obelisks-now known as Cleopatra's Needles-had taken on the "Ozymandias" look so fashionable then: one erect, one top- pled, surrounded by "lone and level sand" on an empty beach. In the nine- teenth century, Egypt gave the needles away: one to England, where it stands on the Victoria Embankment, in Lon- don; the other to the United States, where it stands in Central Park, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early in the third millennium A.D., when I lived in New York, that's where I walked my dog. On the spot in Alexandria where the New York needle had stood were the offices of the Third Circle of Irrigation, which managed the water pumped from the Nile to the cotton and cornfields south of the city. This is where Con- stantine Cavafy, a member of Alexan- drià s large Greek colony and the great- 70 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2009 est Greek poet since antiquity, spent thirty-three years, from 1889 to 1922, as a part-time clerk. Cavafy had visited the needles in their last days on Alexandrian soil. The city, pillaged for centuries, then left for dead, had few such treasures left. The body of St. Mark was suppos- edly stolen from the city in 828 by a band of Venetians, probably not the weirdest looting incident in Alexandrià s history. On Cavafy's walk home from work he passed St. Sabà s, erected on the site of an ancient Byzantine church, and, nearby, the Greek Hospital, where Ha- drian was said to have built his Egyptian palace. A few steps from Cavafy's apart- ment was where Alexander the Great's body had once lain on display, encased in a gold sarcophagus. City poets are by nature passive, the way flypaper is passive. The formula for Juvenal's Rome or Whitman's New York is look hard, listen hard, record. But all the real action in Alexandria had gone down a couple of thousand years earlier, and so the city had to be worked out in Cavafy's head. His job allowed him to daydream, except when his bosses got him to tell stories of Byzan- tium's glorious past. By day, he per- formed his ordinary Alexandrian act: leaving the office; hitting the stock ex- change, where he was licensed to trade; visiting a billiards club. At night he paid beautiful young men-dishwashers and tailors' assistants and grocery boys-for sex. Cavafy's work draws from two in- tensely private sources: the old histories of the Hellenic world which he read in the evenings, and the nights of sex, rigged for retrospective poignancy, that ensued. His readers were limited to the select group who received his poems, privately printed on broadsheets or bound in folders. To encounter him, as his friend E. M. Forster wrote, was to behold "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy's poems, including the thirty "unfinished" poems never before ren- dered in English. The results-now published in two volumes, "C. P. Cavafy: The Collected Poems" (Knopf; $35) and "C. P. Cavafy: Unfinished Poems" (Knopf; $30)-are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them. Cavafy thought of himself as a "poet-historian," which meant that he viewed all human conduct, his own included, in the light of recorded time. When Ezra Pound called the Cantos a "poem containing history," he exempted his poem itself from history, and the second sense of "containing" applies as well: the Cantos are a kind of quarantine of the past. But in Cavafy history is the container: indi- viduals ratde around inside it like pen- nies in a can. Cavafy believed that you couldn't "remember" history no matter what you did, and, in any case, you ,,, d d . " b weren t con emne to repeat It, e- cause it had never gone away. All of the modernist sententiae about history with a capital "H" seemed silly to Cavafy, whose lovers were envoys to the whole Hellenic past. Because everybody dwells in history together, all at once, Cavafy refused to divvy up the available moods into one pile appropriate for obscure Byzantines and another for his Alexandrian rent boys. This makes him a master of mis- matched affect, bringing tenderness to Nicephorus III Botaneiates (the elev- enth-century Byzantine emperor), to Apollonius ofTyana (the neo-Pythag- 2 orean near-contemporary of Jesus), and to Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes 8 (the second-century rhetorician and author of a single extant parable, about ' grief). The forsakenness of these w figures attracted him; their preposter- 6 w ous names alone, strung like beads along a wire, seemed to mark them for ð obscurity. In "Caesarion," Cavafy reads